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Planning for Eerie Season
October is nearly here! The witchiest, gothiest, most autumntacular time of year is once again approaching. If you’re like me, October requires some time commitment and advanced planning in order to get every sanguine drop out of the season. So here is a description of all the stuff I do in October to steep myself in its gothy goodness. Throughout the month, I watch movies: I like to watch creepy, campy and thematic films in October on my way to Halloween. Perennial favorites include Practical Magic, The Others, Jacob’s Ladder, The Sixth Sense, various Hammer Horror films (lots of Christopher Lee!), classics like James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein,…
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A Paradoxical Trip
So, I’m flying today, to help the environment. Seriously. I’m on a work trip to lobby in Washington, D.C., meeting with Congressional and Senatorial offices to promote wilderness protections and promote the designation of three new National Monuments. If ever there were a net-benefit reason to put that carbon in the atmosphere, this would be it. Wild lands are essential for biodiversity, and sequester tremendous volumes of atmospheric carbon when they are managed for thriving ecosystems. My organization, CalWild, is the preeminent voice for protection of wild areas on public lands in the state of California–an internationally-recognized biological diversity hot spot. California also plays an outsized role in climate policy…
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Harvestide
The season of the Harvest Sabbath is upon us again, and it is time for celebration and stock-taking! This Sabbath sometimes gets short shrift, coming as it does on the heels of every Pagan’s favorite witchy month. But it’s an important observance time and a meaningful holiday. Here are some thoughts about what Harvest means and how to celebrate it. To me, this time is the time of celebrating abundance. The winter vegetables are pouring out of the gardens now and where I live, the grape harvest and processing (“The Crush”) fills the air in the rural areas with the smell of fermenting wine. Harvest fairs take place at this…
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The Long Swing into Darkness
The sky has gone hard blue now, and the fog cycle has begun to stutter. Summer is leaving, it’s in the air, and I can feel the good cozy days of colored leaves and the spooky season on the horizon. The angle of the light has changed, the full blaze of the solstice is far behind, and here in the season of Dimming, we have warm, wan, still days before us for awhile yet. Ironically, this is a time of year that feels kind of pregnant to me, even though it is headed towards the dying of the year: it is the burgeoning growth of the Sacred Dark, a fertile…
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Happy Atheopagan Anniversary!
Today, August 5, is the 11-year anniversary of the launching of the Atheopagan community. The Facebook group was created on this day. Although the essay (which became the book) dates back to 2005, this is the anniversary I celebrate. Because this is the day when one guy’s ideas started creating a movement that would be about so much more than just him. 11 years is a long time in Neopagan terms. A lot can change. Consider, for example: the first legally-recognized Pagan church, the Church of All Worlds, was incorporated in 1968. 11 years later, Drawing Down the Moon and The Spiral Dance were published, two books that drove exponential…
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The Sabbath of Technology
Sabbaths have layers: layers of history, of symbolism, of metaphor. Each of the eight Sabbaths of the Atheopagan Wheel of the Year carries a rich complex of meanings and practices, new or old, and layers of history and memory. As a community, our Atheopagan ethic is that every individual practitioner can and should develop for themselves what each Sabbath means and how it is celebrated. But there are some associations with the turning of the seasons that are commonly celebrated by us and by many other modern Pagans. Examples include: At this time of year, at the midpoint between the summer solstice and autumnal equinox, I celebrate the Sabbath of…
